“Why Roseanne Barr could be the woman to take on Sarah Palin and her fellow conservatives…. I am thrilled about Roseanne’s return to the small screen. If she can reharness her power as a TV star, Roseanne will be uniquely situated to call out Sarah Palin and her Mama Grizzlies on their faux-folksy charade and remind women that it’s generally liberals—not conservatives—who have their best interests at heart. While Roseanne isn’t a politician (though she’s joked about running for President) she and Sarah Palin are now playing in the same cultural space as reality TV stars, best-selling authors, and Internet pundits. It’s not just that Roseanne will be better at reality TV than Palin, or that she’ll use comedy to disarm Palin and company, though that’s part of it. It’s that she’s never afraid to go against the Democratic Party line, and she has a longstanding appeal to many women who feel alienated by mainstream liberal feminism and mainstream liberal politics—the very women Sarah Palin and her Mama Grizzlies have been trying to woo.”

// Marginal Utility

"The social-media companies have largely succeeded in persuading users of their platforms' neutrality. What we fail to see is that these new identities are no less contingent and dictated to us then the ones circumscribed by tradition; only now the constraints are imposed by for-profit companies in explicit service of gain.